Contents

Special uses - Vital gameplay importance

Also known as Golden bricks, these building bricks composed of pure gold are the most valuable items a hero can find. Only these are used to build temples. For a complete Temple, a hero needs 1000 of these rarities. When a hero gains one the temple completion percentage increases by 0.1% but only when the temple is 100% complete does the golden brick become a bold artifact to be stored in the inventory once another one has been obtained via the usual means. Once this happens, the gold bricks behave like any other bold artifact and can therefore be sold for money. However, the range that a golden brick can be sold for is 940-1160gold coins which has caused annoyance since it varies greatly from the stock market prices seen in the Godville Times daily.

How to obtain

There are a multitude of ways the hero can obtain a gold brick:

purchase one from a trader when the hero has enough gold[1] and desire to buy one (over which their god has no influence)[2];

receive one as a reward for completing the quest (you can get more if it's an epic quest);

randomly (but rarely) have one fall from the sky with an inscribed message from the god;

have one magically forged from about 3000 Gold coins through god's Influence, by influencing the hero/heroine with Encourage or Punish. By checking the Newspaper, you can find out daily how many Gold coins are needed for a Gold brick although the likelihood of an influence's success is about one chance in four. Punishment is more likely to melt gold coins into a brick than Encouragement.[4][5]

pay a shopkeeper an amount less than 3000 coins to repair a broken gold brick.

Gold Brick Properties

Therefore the total volume is approximately 4418 cm3 Note: Using 1.47 will give 4410 due to it being a rounded figure.

The density of gold is 19.30 g/cm3

Therefore, the weight of one gold brick is approximately 85300 g or 83.3 kg (calculated as 19.30 g/cm3 x 4418 cm3)

Assuming the brick has the same length:width:height ratio of a standard brick (115:55:38) the length, width and height can be calculated to be: 30.3 cm 14.5 cm and 10.0 cm respectively.

Why Gold?

Advantages for Heroes

Gold is considered the holiest of materials, though not the rarest, and has been since the beginning of civilization. It is very unreactive (it's a noble metal) and so can stand up to the might of the elements (nobody wants their temple to fall down). It is also the most malleable and ductile of all metals making it easy to shape it into bricks. The only downside is that gold tends to be very expensive and golden bricks even more so. Over the years many heroes have gone against their gods' wishes and decided that the best material for the bricks of their temple should be platinum since it is rarer. Other heroes use lead thinking it is heavier and harder to knock down, only to be disappointed when they discover that gold is 70% denser than lead. There is the rare breed of hero who has used the same logic, but gone one step further and used uranium. These chemically challenged heroes are also thwarted when it turns out that uranium is not after all the densest naturally occurring element, and after 4.47 billion years, half of the temple turns to lead anyway. If only heroes had some sort of World-Wide Whatever that they could use to learn about the density of elements, these tragedies might be avoided. Uranium also features the side effect of radioactivity, which heroes don't have any knowledge of, but since gods routinely heal and resurrect their heroes this unpleasant effect goes unnoticed. There is a famous story of one hero who decided to build their temple out of the rarest material they could find in order to honour their god sufficiently. Unfortunately, this turned out to be tritium and so the temple merely diffused into the environment before it could be fully assembled. It is for these reasons that heroes normally tend to use gold. Clever heroes actually alloy their gold bricks with nickel as this makes them a lot tougher and so provides further support for the temple.

Advantages for Gods

Why have Gods ordered their heroes to undertake such a hard task as to collect bricks made of gold? For evil gods, it is because they wish their heroes to suffer as much as possible yet complete the task eventually so that their hero is the best. There are plenty of sensible reasons for choosing gold as the primary temple building material though. For a start, gold is nicely reflective making it extremely easy for gods to see their shiny temples from way up high in the sky. It is rare and will give to the god some bragging rights, and even the heretics have to awe at the golden masterpiece. Gold is renowned for its electrical conductivity too which makes it a prime candidate for conducting divine thunderbolts to misbehaving heroes trying to hide in their temples. One of the main reasons though is that gold has the relatively low melting point of 1064.18 degrees Celsius enabling gods to easily melt the gold coins heroes collect into the bricks they need for their temple. This gives the gold coins another use apart from being currency, which makes for added productivity. and
also is a great godpower manufacturer so can easily give the the god a charge or two every day. (only of course if the hero can collect in time)

About Gold

Gold's electron arrangement

Symbol: Au (from the latin Aurum)

Atomic number: 79

Atomic mass: 196.996569 g/mol

Electronegativity: 2.54 (Pauling Scale)

Element Category: Transition metal

References

↑The actual price fluctuates, depending on the current market price of gold bricks (can be seen in the 'Market Quotes' section of the Godville Times) and the place of purchase; 1750 coins was the lowest price ever observed so far. This was for a brick purchased in Anville.

↑The rumor is that the likelihood of gold brick purchase increases the more gold the hero has, but that was not reliably confirmed.

↑ The artifact will not necessarily convert all bold artifacts to golden bricks. However, the more bold artifacts you have, there is a higher chance that more of them will turn into bricks.